Thursday, August 28, 2008

PURCELL DISSES MONMOUTH's DIVERSITY

In his column in last week's (August 21st) Courier, publisher Jim Purcell laments Monmouth County's lack of "diversity."
Say what?!
What does he mean by the PC term diversity anyway? Monmouth County has about as much diversity as the next county. Yes, it's a predominantly white county, but not exclusively.
Many different communities make up our county. Holmdel has sizeable East Asian and South Asian communities. Long Branch, Neptune and Asbury Park have large African-American communities, as do Red Bank, Tinton Falls and Freehold Borough; smaller black communities exist in Matawan, Keyport and Aberdeen. Even Middletown has the enclave of Hillside Park. Howell has the Kalmuck Mongol community, one of the largest Buddhist communities in New Jersey.
Freehold and Red Bank, among other towns, have large Latino communities.
Even white communities are not all the same. Marlboro, Manalapan, Aberdeen and Ocean have large Jewish populations, whereas the southern shore towns, centering on Spring Lake, have been dubbed the "Irish Riviera."
I could go on and on. But I think you get the point. We're all Americans here. The things that unite us outnumber those that divide.
Sounding more like The Big Professor, Purcell also sounds a drum beaten by many on the left:
" Indeed, in many ways this 'conversation' about race will end one day. In this country, by 2050, the majority of the population in the United States will no longer be white. The majority of voters will be something other than white, and so the whole issue of race will be a lot plainer for some folks to grasp—because they'll have to."
This sounds like typical liberal "drive-by" media stuff. Promoting "get-even-ism" when whites are a minority, the left fails to take into account the fact that America has absorbed many peoples of all colors and from all continents and made them into... Americans.
And Americans work out our differences.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Biden: My State Was a Slave State

Robinette in his own words:

SPEAKING OF APOLOGIES...

The vast editorial staff here at the Monmouth County Republican Blog has been following very intently the controversy a-brewin' over More Monmouth Musings' Art Gallagher's attempt to start a discussion on race relations. Recently, Art ran a post in which he reprinted an article by Jeffery Lord in The American Spectator, Democrats: The Missing Years. That reminded us of a post we did back in February linking to an editorial in The Trentonian.
This week, the Democratic Party is poised to nominate Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American to be nominated by a major party, and Joseph Robinette Biden, who likes Obama because he's a "clean" African American. This would be a great opportunity for them to apologize as a party for slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc.
With the Democratic National Convention in session this week, we were going to repost the link, but found it no longer active, so we are reprinting the editorial here.
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Published in The Trentonian, Friday, February 1, 2008


Speaking of apologies...
Exuding righteousness, Democrats who control the N. J. legislature recently led an effort to proffer an official state apology for slavery. the apology presumably included within its sweeping mea-culpa ambit even those many New Jersey citizens whose forbears arrived in this country after slavery had been abolished and thus had nothing remotely to do with it. The New Jersey apology, at least, made no exceptions for this extensive category.
The legislature's heralded and hailed effort leads us to wonder aloud: Would these righteousness-exuding New Jersey Democrats now be willing to position themselves in the forefront of an initiative to apologize for their own national party's long and ignoble history of racism? Not that the Republican Party's own history on matters of race is unexceptionable, mind you. Far, far from it. But the GOP's record on racial issues can't remotely approach the out-and-out odiousness, spanning decades, of the Democratic Party's.
This sorry, shameful record has been disinterred in economist Bruce Bartlett's book, "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past." So New Jersey's Democratic legislators would be spared the burden of research to support a formal party apology as a plank in the upcoming national convention platform. In an article in The American Spectator recently, Jeffrey Lord, one-time Reagan White House aide, suggested such a platform. Lord is, of course, a conservative polemicist and -- Democrats might understandably object -- a partisan troublemaker. Yet facts are facts, as it's often said, and Lord's summation of the Democratic racial record is not something easily waved aside. Certainly the record is nothing Democratic legislators can shrug off as ancient history or water over the dam -- especially not after having ostentatiously championed the slavery apology.
Here's a brief sampling of the Democratic Party's racial record:

  • Six national party platforms, 1840-1860, spoke out vehemently in support of slavery.
  • The national party platform in 1864 declared the Union's military efforts to quell the slavery-supporting Confederacy a "failure" and demanded negotiations with a view toward at least a partial acceptance of slavery.
  • At the 1900 national convention, the Democratic Party remained silent on the issue of race as de facto and de jure discrimination leached like toxic waste into all corners of America -- especially in the solidly Democratic South. (The GOP platform that year, in contrast, stated that "the plain purpose" of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was to "prevent discrimination on account of race or color in regulating the elective franchise." The Republican platform added: "Devices of state government ... to avoid the purpose of this amendment ... should be condemned.")
  • Four Democratic Party national platforms (1908-1920) were silent on the issues of lynching, segregation and voting-rights suppression of African Americans. (The GOP platforms in those years addressed these issues.)
  • The 1924 Democratic National Convention, held in New York City, defeated a proposed platform plank condemning Ku Klux Klan violence. The party confab was dubbed with fully justifiable derision the Democrats' "Klanbake." (Noteworthy local angle: In celebration of the platform victory, 10,000 pointed-hooded Klansmen rallied across the river in New Jersey, cavorting triumphantly around burning crosses.)

It seems almost like a late hit or piling-on, but we'll risk throwing in a mention that such notable race-baiters as Bull Connors and Orval Faubus and George Wallace and Lester Maddox were all stalwart Democrats. And, oh, yes, Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright (the furrowed-brow foreign policy intellectual and Bill Clinton's hero) was unwaveringly segregationist to the very end of his political career and a signer of "The Southern Manifesto."
Do we hear a motion for a Democratic Party apology?
--The Trentonian